Set Continue Selling when Out Of Stock for all my products.

[Oz_Barron]

I have a shop with lots of products. They sync from POSIM, my POS. I also do a lot of special orders, many of them come in quickly, so I'd like to set all my products so they can be sold, even if out of stock. I don't see any way to do this in Shopify. Does anyone know of a solution? I want this to be the default for any new items I add. Thanks so much!

[Miles · Accepted solution]

Hi, @Oz_Barron!

I'm Miles from the Social Care team at Shopify.

At this stage, there is no option to allow overselling as a default setting, however, you are absolutely able to select this option for new and existing products.

For New Products
When creating your product, under inventory, ensure "Track Inventory" is ticked. This is generally ticked by default. Underneath that checkbox, you'll see another option to "Continue selling when out of stock". Once this is ticked, the product will be available for overselling when out of stock.

Bulk Updates for Existing Products
For existing products, you're able to edit them in bulk, so you can make the change once for all existing products. To allow overselling for these products, follow these steps:

1. Go to Products > All Products
2. Select all products.
3. Click "Edit products".
4. Once the spreadsheet opens, click "Add fields" and select "Continue selling when out of stock".
5. Tick the checkboxes for all products you'd like to continue selling when sold out.

We have a great guide around bulk editing that might be useful for you. If you'd like to import or update via products via a CSV, you can also check out this guide.

Have a great day!

[Oz_Barron]

Thanks Miles. It's much appreciated. Allow me to request that as an option. Or by collection, or some other manner.

[Miles]

Hey, @Oz_Barron!

I can absolutely pass on this feedback to our product team for you. It's a great idea to have this is a default option, or, as you suggested, being able to edit specific collections to oversell.

Thanks again for reaching out!

[ThePaws]

Totally effective and good control with this solution. Thank you Miles.

[AlyssaCo-op]

Hi there!

This is a great option, although I'd love my customers to KNOW that this is a backorder and the chances that the get the item is slim. Is there a way to communicate that? Right now it just says "Available Now!" which is not technically correct. 

[Oz_Barron]

For those following along, being able to edit these in bulk has worked great.

[AidarA]

It's a good idea if you have ten products, but checking the boxes of several hundreds of them... It's misleading to even call this operation "bulk" in a very technical sense. Because it definitely isn't. 

[Karlien]

Good day,

I hope you can assist me. This solution works temporarily on one of my products (on the rest it works fine). I set the product to continue selling when out of stock, only when I have a look at it after a hour or so the product shows as Out of stock on the site again. I then make the same change, save it again and before you know it the product again shows as out of stock. Can you please advise why this is happening? As mentioned several of my other products are marked the same and they do not default to Sold Out?

Kind Regards

Karlien

[stouchette]

I actually have been experiencing the same thing as Karlien in our staging instance where I set an item to continue to sell when out of stock. I come back shortly after and its unchecked. I did it  the bulk update the variants, we as well as manually from the variants. Trying to work on setting up  to take Pre-orders. I am on my 7th app since most are not well thought out or are missing key components or don't work. We are about to just write our own custom app for it.

[Karlien]

Hello Stouchette,

Has anyone been able to assist you with this, unfortunately shopify community or support has not assisted me with feedback on why this is or how I can fix it ? I am still for some unclarified reason experiencing the out of stock on some products? 

Kind Regards

Karlien

[stouchette]

Hi, The weird thing was that was just in our staging store for some reason. It might have had something to do with all the apps I added and removed, and some where still live in that instance. Some apps don't play well with others, and cause more problems than they are ever worth. I ended up skipping the apps since I was so frustrated with them either not installing right and working, or they where buggy or missing key components I expected. So I ended up using Accentuate to create 2 fields one for our Expected Ship Date and one for the Qty to Presell. I then import a full list of those two fields every 1-3 days or so to keep them updated. Then I also built into our Shopify product import to set the oversell to deny or continue. I also started writing some code to set the oversell field to deny or continue to the API so we don't have to rely on a manual product feed update from our listers. I just need to log on my end when items are added or removed from open POs from our POS, then trigger the deny or continue via API. We upload a full product feed to Shopify every week or so, so that would turn on or off any oversells. The theme code we set it up so that if the product was set in Shopify to oversell, then it will display the Accentuate field that shows the Estimated Ship Date. Haven't gotten around to limiting the amount they can add to cart to be the Qty in the other Accentuate field. But I assume that won't really be an issue since most sales are just for qty=1.

[EllyGann1]

Hi, I'm having a slightly different issue where my stock is over-selling, even though all the fields are set up to not let this happen, I've also followed this step by step and all the filters were correct so we're not sure what's wrong; 

My shopify site is 'over selling' products. I have gone through the step-by-step process below and it wasn't set up to oversell; Go to Products > All Products.
Select all products.
Click "Edit products".
Once the spreadsheet opens, click "Add fields" and select "Continue selling when out of stock".
Tick the checkboxes for all products you'd like to continue selling when sold out.

Please could someone get in touch directly as it's effecting the customer service for our brand. 

Thanks, 

Elly

[stouchette]

Can you share a screen short of the admin for the product and a sample URL
of the item on the website? Do you have any apps/code that could be
altering showing items or allowing the oversell?

If you have in shopify an item set to not oversell (deny), then I am not
sure how the item would still be for sale unless you have some other
customization.

I just have code on my end when I see that we sold the last one of a
style/product, then I use the Shopify API to set the item as out of stock.
Then if we get some back in, it shows up in our daily manual product feed
import for edited items which then publishes the item. For oversell, we do
the same where our product import controls it and while the feed is created
it checks our POS if we have an open PO, and also subtracts any open orders
in Shopify so we don't oversell. Once they are all committed, we hit the
Shopify product API to turn off the oversell. We also use Accentuate to
import in the dates for each variant of when the item should ship so we can
display that as the user picks various sizes on our site.

[SuzanneOddy1]

I agree. It's terribly time consuming. It's effectively a manual operation.